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Mary I of England
Mary I of England (18 February 1516-17 November 1558) was Queen of England and Ireland from 19 July 1553 to 17 November 1558, succeeding Lady Jane Grey and preceding Elizabeth I. Mary was the daughter of King Henry VIII of England and Queen Catherine of Aragon, and she was infamous for her aggressive attempt to reverse her father's English Reformation, earning her the nickname "Bloody Mary". Her re-establishment of Catholicism as the state religion of England was reversed after her death. Biography Early life Mary was born in Greenwich, London, England on 18 February 1516, the daughter of King Henry VIII of England and Queen Catherine of Aragon. Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury served as her governess during her youth, and she was known as a precocious child. As a young child, she was originally betrothed to marry King Francis I of France's son Dauphin Henry, but this betrothal was later broken so that she could be betrothed to the much older Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain. This betrothal, too, would fail, as Charles decided that he did not want to wait for Mary to grow older, and he instead married Isabella of Portugal in 1530. Family troubles After King Henry decided to divorce Queen Catherine, he had the two separated, with Mary being sent with her tutor to Ludlow Castle in the Welsh Marches, while her mother was sent to another castle in the countryside. In 1533, she was stripped of her title as Princess of Wales and demoted to "Lady Mary", while her mother, formerly "Queen of England", was demoted to "Princess Dowager of Wales". Mary would suffer from irregular menstruation and depression as a young girl, possibly caused by stress. In 1536, after the downfall of Queen Anne, the rise of Queen Jane Seymour, and Henry's insistence that all nobles recognize him as the head of the Church of England and repudiate Papal authority, Mary was bullied into signing a document agreeing to her father's demands. In 1541, Margaret Pole was executed after her son Reginald Pole was implicated in a Catholic plot against King Henry. However, after Catherine Parr married the king in 1543, Parr brought the family back together, and Mary and her half-sister Elizabeth were brought back into the line of succession. Mary, who had a rough upbringing, always found a true and caring friend in the German ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, who would often visit her at her home and advise her. On New Year's Eve of 1540, she told him that he was her truest friend, and that she could not bear the day when he left; she was devastated when Chapuys left England due to his affliction from gout. Mary was given a Catholic humanist education designed by the Spanish philosopher Juan Luis Vives, and she learned to translate Erasmus' paraphrasing of the Bible into English. During her pre-queenship years, she was sent to Wales, as she was the notional "Princess of Wales" under her father. Mary had her own household, and she presided over the Council of Wales and the Marches from Ludlow Castle, where her mother had once resided. Her father granted her lands in East Anglia, and she also presided over Framlingham in Suffolk; by the end of Henry VIII's death in 1547, she was essentially a territorial magnate and the highest-ranking noble in the realm (being the oldest and most prominent member of the House of Tudor). As a landed noblewoman, Mary had experiences appointing councillors, running estates, and settling disputes, making up for her initial exclusion from the succession. Queen of England On 6 July 1553, Mary's younger brother King Edward died from tuberculosis at the age of 15, and Edward named his aunt Mary Tudor's granddaughter Lady Jane Grey as his successor; the Protestant Edward disliked his Catholic sister Mary. On 10 July 1553, Jane was proclaimed Queen by John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland and his supporters. However, Mary was immensely popular in the countryside, rallying her affinity and insisting that she was the Queen on the basis that the Act of Succession and King Henry VIII's will had named her as second-in-line to the throne after her brother. She deposed Jane on 19 July, and she entered London on 3 August 1553 on a wave of popular support. Mary had the Catholics Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk and Stephen Gardiner released from the Tower of London, and she had Dudley executed and Jane imprisoned. In February 1554, she had Jane executed after her father, Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Suffolk became a part of a rebellion against Mary's rule. Unlike Elizabeth, Mary was forced to fight for her throne, facing down Lady Jane Grey's coup d'etat and putting down a Protestant rebellion against her rule; she had adequately demonstrated her military and political acumen by the time she inherited the throne. On 25 July 1554, after crushing Wyatt's Rebellion, Queen Mary went along with her plans to marry Prince Philip of Spain, creating an alliance with the Catholic Habsburg dynasty. This marriage proved unpopular among many English people, who feared that, as Philip was now the jure uxoris King of England, the country would become a Habsburg dependency. Mary implemented Catholicism as the state religion and persecuted Protestant clergymen, earning the nickname "Bloody Mary" for her violent suppression of Protestantism (including the execution of Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer). She also imprisoned her own sister Elizabeth on the suspicion that she had supported the Protestant rebellion against her rule. Most of those persecuted during her reign were centered in London, a heavily Protestant family, and most of the executed were from the younger, more Protestant-oriented generation, causing her reputation to suffer. Late reign and death While the start of Mary's reign was successful, the growth of the population and the decline of the economy due to the devaluation of coinage by Henry VIII (as well as perennial disease) led to the decline of England in the mid-1550s. Mary ordered the recall and melting of devalued coinage and increased the gold content of reissued coinage, making efforts to stabilize prices and revalue the coinage. The economic effects of her coinage programme would only be felt during Elizabeth's reign. In 1557, she was persuaded by Philip to enter the war against France during the Italian War of 1551-59, but this war would prove ruinous, as England lost Calais as a result. Mary fell ill from uterine cancer in 1558, and she did not have any children; she was forced to accept her sister Elizabeth as her successor. She died in November 1558, and her last words mourned the loss of Calais. Category:1516 births Category:1558 deaths Category:English queens Category:English Category:Queens Category:Catholics